The present invention relates generally to the field of video conferencing, and more particularly to analyzing sentiment of attendees in a video conference.
Global business meetings commonly occur by video conference, connecting people across multiple continents and time zones. Video conferences enable participants to share video and audio content with each other in a real-time environment across multiple continents. Using visual and verbal communication cues provides attendees in a video conference with the ability to interact and communicate more clearly. Attendees may use facial expressions to aide verbal communication and, through face to face communication, develop relationships that aide in business endeavors and team building.
Sentiment analysis aides in the understanding of effective communication and recognition of emotions during human-computer interactions. Sentiment analysis includes polarity which considers emotional classifications such as “positive”, “negative” or “neutral” text (or speech), and advanced polarity which considers more specific emotional classifications such as happy, sad, fear, disgust, surprise and anger. A developed and fairly mature technology as applied to the written word such as books, articles, and political event reports, sentiment analysis progresses to the spoken word and human speech with the advent of speech analysis programs and natural language processing. Sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude and/or reaction of a speaker with respect to some topic or discussion in the overall context of a discussion where the attitude may be determined not just by what is said but how it is said.
Sentiment analysis integrating facial recognition algorithms and software utilizing facial expressions has been used to evaluate sentiment. Analysis of facial expressions and facial movements may determine sentiment of a subject. Sentiment analysis techniques integrating both words and facial expressions have shown promising results providing a machine or computer with an ability to understand or determine human emotions and emotional responses.